Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Payne, Corey R. (2020). “War and Workers’ Power in the United States: Labor Struggles in War-Provisioning Industries, 1993-2016,” Journal of Labor and Society. Vol. 23, Issue 1: 111-130.
Abstract – At the turn of the 21st century, a general disempowerment of industrial workers in the United States yielded pessimistic assessments of the labor movement. Yet, during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, industrial war‐provisioning workers in the United States engaged in a wave of largely successful struggles for a greater share of expanding war‐profits. This article investigates these strikes in war‐provisioning industries from 1993 to 2016, finding a wave of offensive struggles between 2003 and 2009. This wave is indicative of an increase in these workers’ structural bargaining power, due to growing state reliance on war‐materials provisioning during wartime. Nevertheless, transformations in the organization of production and war‐making made such empowerment ephemeral. This article demonstrates how changes in military actions and strategy—most notably, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama “pivot” to East Asia, and escalating “great power” rivalry—affect the bargaining power of workers in war‐provisioning industries.
Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio, & Corey R. Payne. (2019). “Sugar, Slavery, and Creative Destruction: World-Magnates and ‘Coreification’ in the Longue-Durée,” Journal of World-Systems Research. Vol. 25, Issue 2: 395-419.
Abstract – Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and periphery. Namely, we challenge the notion that these zones consist of geographical spaces that, since very early in the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production of raw materials (periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have been trans-historically relatively free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in peripheral ones. We argue that, prior to the nineteenth century, the world-economy is not only characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various forms of labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but also one in which core-like and peripheral activities (that is, those providing access to relatively greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly bounded geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that a longue-durée analysis of sugar production by enslaved labor illustrates not merely processes of peripheralization, but of what we call coreification.
Book Chapters
Payne, Corey R. (Forthcoming). “Delinking from the Warfare-Welfare Paradigm: Militarism, Emancipation, and Social Compact Unravelling in the United States” in De-Linking: Critical Thought and Radical Politics, M. Boatca, ed. London: Routledge.
Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio, & Corey R. Payne. (Forthcoming). “Rethinking Core and Periphery in Historical Capitalism: World-Magnates and The Shifting Epicenters of Wealth Accumulation,” in Mielants, E., & Katsiaryna, S.B., eds., Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future. London: Routledge.
Portuguese translation. Korzeniewicz, Roberto Patricio, & Corey R. Payne.(Forthcoming). “O centro e a periferia no capitalismo histórico: os epicentros cambiantes da acumulação de riqueza,” in Brussi, A., ed., Brasilia: Cultura Academica Editoria.
Pasciuti, Daniel S. and Corey R. Payne. (2018). “Illusion in Crisis? World-Economic and Zonal Volatility, 1975-2013,” in The World-System as Unit of Analysis: Past Contributions and Future Advances, Korzeniewicz, R.P., ed. London: Routledge, pp. 50-64. (Online Appendices)
Reviews
Payne, Corey R. (2019). “Review of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel,” Journal of World-Systems Research. Vol. 25, Issue 1.
Opinion & Analysis (Partial List)
“The Militarization of Johns Hopkins Exposes a Nationwide Trend,” in Truthout. April 5, 2019. (Co-authored by Steph Saxton).
“Johns Hopkins’ “troubled history” with Baltimore disqualifies its private police proposal,” on Medium. February 27, 2019. (Picked up by The Baltimore Brew).
“The School of Subcontracting,” in Jacobin Magazine. October 25, 2016.
“JHU efforts to cut a union company raises doubts about its commitment to Baltimore,” in The Baltimore Sun. July 29, 2016. (Co-authored by Gray Hargrove and Chase Alston).
“Reentry Through Resistance,” in CounterPunch Magazine. May 31, 2016.
